The Anglican ministry is both the leadership and agency of Christian service in the Anglican Communion. "Ministry" commonly refers to the office of ordained clergy: the threefold order of bishops, priests and deacons. More accurately, Anglican ministry includes many laypeople who devote themselves to the ministry of the church, either individually or in lower/assisting offices such as lector, acolyte, sub-deacon, Eucharistic minister, cantor, musicians, parish secretary or assistant, warden, vestry member, etc. Ultimately, all baptized members of the church are considered to partake in the ministry of the Body of Christ. Each of the provinces (usually corresponding to individual world nations) of the Anglican Communion has a high degree of independence from the other provinces, and each of them have slightly different structures for ministry, mission and governance. However, personal leadership is always vested in a member of the clergy (a bishop at provincial and diocesan levels, and a priest (often termed a rector or pastor at the parish level) and consensus derived by synodical government. At different levels of the church's structure, laity, clergy (priests/pastors and deacons) and bishops meet together with prayer to deliberate over church governance. These gatherings are variously called conferences, synods, general or church-wide conventions, convocations, councils, chapters and vestries. History and background The effect of Henry VIII's Act in Restraint of Appeals and first Act of Supremacy was to establish royal authority in all matters spiritual and temporal, even assigning the power of ecclesiastical visitation over the Church in the English Realm. Queen Elizabeth I, while declining the title of Supreme Head, was declared to be "Supreme Governor of this realm ... as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes as temporal". Thus, although the Church of England was regarded in the sixteenth century as a church of the Reformation, it nonetheless maintained the historic church structure, including the maintenance of the threefold order of the ministry, with bishops, consecrated in apostolic succession, ordaining deacons, and priests. Thus, Anglican ordained ministry resembles that found in churches of the Catholic tradition (see Minister (Catholic Church)). While the Puritan ascendency in England briefly introduced a parallel presbyterian polity, Anglicanism worldwide is defined in part by the historic structure, although outside the British Isles it has no supreme governor. According to the Roman Catholic Church the Anglican Church has neither valid priests nor valid bishops as per the papal bull of 1896 (Apostolicae Curae), all